Snaplogic box-case-study

1. The Box Backstory
Like another great technology startup, enterprise cloud company Box was born in a dorm room. At
the University of Southern California in 2005, founder Aaron Levie quickly realized that the business
project he was working on at school — cloud storage options for companies — indicated a unique
opportunity to develop an online file storage business. Levie took a leave of absence and launched Box.
The company took off from there, transforming over the years to become
what it is today — a publicly traded online file sharing and content manage-
ment service with more than $300 million in revenue in fiscal 2016. Box
tallies more than 41 million users and 59,000 businesses worldwide, includ-
ing 59 percent of the Fortune 500, all of them trusting the rapidly growing
global company to manage their content in the cloud.
While the Box platform presents tremendous efficiencies for business users
who share their content on any device with other users, internally the com-
pany was challenged by the need to efficiently integrate the many cloud-
based applications — such as Salesforce, Zuora, Netsuite, and Tableau — it
relied on in its daily operations. The goal was to aggregate the business data
piling up in the various applications in a cloud-based warehouse for the
purpose of self-service predictive analytics. The intelligence gleaned from
this exercise would inform decisions on generating better sales and market-
ing campaigns, among other internal uses.
The challenges were manifold, given the company’s vast array of business
applications and the many ways in which they needed to integrate. “We rely
on multiple applications covering sales, marketing, consulting, user services,
financials, and people, each serving a distinct purpose,” said Alan Leung, Box
Senior Enterprise Systems Program Manager. “Within each domain like
Finance, there could be a dozen different applications just in that one area,
“Data needs to be
delivered to a user
in the right place
at the right time in
the right volume.”
Alan Leung
Box Senior Enterprise Systems
Program Manager
Case Study — Box
Connecting the Dots at Box
Box taps SnapLogic’s self-service integration to
process more than 15 million transactions daily.
1

2. all of them purpose-built. Although some apps offered a
measure of integration out of the box, it was nowhere
near what we needed.”
He’s referring in part to the Application Programming
Interfaces (APIs) that technology companies use to
integrate their products. Each cloud-based application’s
endpoints for integration purposes behave differently,
limiting the ability to build useful links quickly. Visually,
the different applications across the Box enterprise
loomed like a series of disjointed silos. Users had to
manually upload and download data from one application
into another, a process that absorbed substantial time
and effort, stealing focus away from more strategic
pursuits. The solution was to find a cloud-based platform
that vastly reduced or eliminated the time-consuming
manual uploading and downloading processes that users
had habitually endured.
Early Misstep
The hunt was on for an Integration Platform as a Service
(iPaaS) vendor with a toolset that supported the fluid flow
of business data across the company’s disparate cloud-
based and on-premise applications into what Leung called
a “data lake.” The platform also needed to provide the
sought-after data aggregation, warehousing, and analyt-
ics capabilities and be user-friendly. It was a tall order.
In 2014, Box subscribed to a platform provider that
appeared to fulfill the company’s many needs, but
ultimately failed its high expectations. “The skill sets
required to use the platform were way too high; you had
to be a software programmer to efficiently use it,” said
Leung, who joined Box in 2015. “We had about six integra-
tion links built after one year, a fraction of the integration
capabilities we wanted.”
Another problem with the platform was time-consuming
bottlenecks. A case in point is when users pushed 150,000
records to an external endpoint that could only handle
500 records per patch. The process consumed five to six
hours from start to finish. “Within two weeks after I came
here, I decided that we needed to find another platform,”
Leung said.
The hunt continued, this time for an iPaaS vendor with a
platform that did not require such sophisticated user
technical skills. Fortunately, Leung’s background is in data
and application integration. He had previously worked at
nearly all the major integration vendors, making him the
most knowledgeable person to lead the journey. Leung
Case Study | Box
“We’ve connected 23 applications and are processing more than 15M transactions daily.
That’s astronomical given that we’ve only needed 1.5 FTE developers to support it.”
Alan Leung, Box Senior Enterprise Systems Program Manager
2
23
APPLICATIONS
CONNECTED
170
DATA
PIPELINES
15M+
DAILY
TRANSACTIONS

3. kept an open mind regarding the various platforms with
which he was familiar, methodically exploring the market-
place to see what other products might be available.
He had a very clear picture in mind of what he was looking
for. “It all comes down to agility — how quickly and effi-
ciently you can develop an integration from Point A to
Point B,” he said. “That’s when I discovered SnapLogic.”
Singular Value Proposition
SnapLogic was unique in the market. The iPaaS vendor
offered a fully unified platform for application and data
integration at much faster speeds and greater efficiency.
A user simply chooses among SnapLogic’s more than 400
pre-packaged codes (or “Snaps”) to link different cloud-
based and on-premise applications, building data flows
between these siloes. Both structured and unstructured
data can be aggregated and analyzed to inform business
decisions. The complexity of the integration occurs
behind the scenes, meaning that one does not need to be
a software programmer to use the platform effectively.
SnapLogic offered the self-service integration functional-
ity that Leung had sought. “It’s all point and click,” he said.
“There’s no programming involved. We’ve lowered the bar
of entry for virtually anybody to leverage the platform.”
Consequently, users can rapidly extract useful information
from the “data lake,” no time-consuming fishing involved.
“Instead of taking five to six hours to push 150,000 records
to an external endpoint, we were able to push three times
that volume of information to the external endpoint in
about two minutes,” Leung said.
Since implementing SnapLogic in mid-2015, not a single
interface has been built internally. “We just haven’t had
the need; the tools do it for us,” said Leung. “We’ve got
well over 170 automated ‘Snaps’ on the platform to date,
connecting endpoints in a unified integrated environ-
ment, whether the data is event-driven, in batch, in the
cloud, or on premise. We’re scaling to enormous data
volumes, analyzing more than 100 million records in a
recent integration.”
The efficiencies are extraordinary. But even more signifi-
cant is the impact on operations. “Due to the enhanced
ability to quickly analyze and make sense of our data, we
can rapidly pivot our operations to seize opportunities
across every aspect of the business, from finance, sales
and marketing to even legal and engineering,” he said.
“To be able to harvest and maintain all this business
data in one place — and perform much better analytics —
has become vital in our competitive, high-growth
environment.”
Down the line, Leung said that more “Snaps” gradually will
be implemented. “Data needs to be delivered to a user in
the right place at the right time in the right volume,” he
added. “I have a vision where all the friction involving data
is removed, a day where no one has to jump through a
hoop in the effort to move the business forward.”
“It’s all point and click...
there’s no programming
involved. We’ve lowered
the bar of entry for virtually
anybody to leverage the
platform.”
Alan Leung
Box Senior Enterprise Systems
Program Manager
3
Case Study | Box

4. SnapLogic is the global leader in self-service integration. The
company’s Enterprise Integration Cloud makes it fast and
easy to connect applications, data and things. Hundreds of
customers across the Global 2000 – including Adobe, Astra-
Zeneca, Box, Capital One, GameStop, Verizon and Wendy’s –
rely on SnapLogic to automate business processes, acceler-
ate analytics and drive digital transformation. SnapLogic was
founded by data industry veteran Gaurav Dhillon and is
backed by blue-chip investors including Andreessen Horow-
itz, Capital One, Ignition Partners, Microsoft, Triangle Peak
Partners and Vitruvian Partners.
Instead of taking five to six hours to push 150,000 records
to an external endpoint, we were able to push three times that volume
of information to the external endpoint in about two minutes.
BOX
“ ”
Other customers using SnapLogic for enterprise integration
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